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Jon Udell on the Nerd's Spreadsheet
rcs1000 writes "Jon Udell has a interesting article on a new type of spreadsheet: one targeted specifically at techies. The skinny is that any spreadsheet is actually a computer program, only in Resolver One, the product profiled in Udell's piece, this is explicit rather than implicit. And the code is IronPython rather than VBA. There are some other cool things it does — allowing cells to contain objects, and allowing spreadsheets to back-end websites." Udell's screencast gives a good demo, though the presenters are a bit hard to hear due to the phone connection. Resolver's own screencast is an alternative.
Multiply 850*77.1 correctly?
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
and allowing spreadsheets to back-end websites
munge them?
hack them?
copulate with them?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
A good portion of spreadsheets actually should be database tables of some kind. People end up manually grouping and other stuff that report-writers can do automatically. What is needed is a kind of "dynamic" RDBMS tool that has open-ended columns and column widths. A "spreadbase"? The Oracle clones are all too rigid.
As far as spreadsheets for programming, I've experimented a lot with data dictionaries to simplify column management and column sub-sets for regular ol' edit-and-report screens. So far it is tricky because one often wants to tweak something for a particular context and one-size-fits-all hits a wall. The trick is finding a good, clean way to "override" specifics from the table when needed or just make alternative entries of a given column and select them via set notation when needed; but I've yet to find a clean, simple convention. It ends up fairly messy such that regular copy-and-paste is unfortunately the cleaner solution much of the time. Maybe if the toolset and the language was geared toward nimble data dictionaries, these approaches would be smoother. Forcing a non-data-oriented language to act data-oriented is like trying to keep a toddler in line.
Table-ized A.I.